Exemplary embodiments herein relate to vehicles, and more particularly to a collision mitigation system and frame assembly.
For handling car-to-car frontal offset collisions, most current vehicles are designed such that the vehicle safety cage absorbs as much momentum as possible over the longest possible time span without allowing anything to intrude into the passenger cabin. This design methodology typically favors larger, heavier vehicles, as they tend to continue forward after colliding with smaller vehicles. This reduces the amount of momentum that must be absorbed. Unfortunately, the smaller vehicle tends to move backward after these crashes, which increases the amount of momentum that these vehicles must absorb.
By way of example, a small vehicle can go from 40 mph to −5 mph in a very short period of time after a frontal offset collision, while a larger vehicle can go from 40 mph to 5 mph in a slightly longer span due to the length of the front-end crumple zone on a larger vehicle. This is often one of the reason that larger vehicles tend to do better in these types of crashes and the crash tests corresponding thereto. Unfortunately, one of the leading causes of injury and death in this type of collision is the sudden change in momentum. This sudden change in momentum can cause severe injury to the vehicle occupant. A primary goal of vehicle safety cage design is currently to maximize the time over which such momentum is absorbed thereby minimizing the initial impact on the vehicle occupant. However, as the current trend is toward smaller and smaller vehicles, new design methodologies are needed to improve frontal offset crash protection in small cars.